Anais Nin on Love and/or Passion

This means so much to me...right now, but also in general:

Max underlines the "comedy" of love, as most cynics do, forgetting that the moments of illusion and passion are the highest moments of life, are those one remembers. To dwell so much on the disintegration of passion when tested by human reality is merely to assert that death ultimately triumphs over our bodies, but this does not mean that we should refuse to live or love. These philosophers discount the duration of passion, its euphorias and ecstacies, to observe only its dissolution. If we are unable to make passion a relationship of duration, surviving the destruction and erosions of daily life, it still does not divest passion of its power to transform, transfigure, transmute a human being from a rather limited, petty, fearful creature to a magnificent figure reaching at moments the status of myth. My moments of courage and divination were all born of passion. The deserts which follow I do not dwell on.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life, that it is in this way that poetry becomes the greatest truth, by intensification, condensation of experience. While poetry is considered by most as illusion and delusion, it is the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive.

(emphasis mine)